Donald Trump is a fervent believer in using death and destruction to achieve his ends. Celebrating his military attacks on alleged drug boats on the high seas, he vowed, “If you try to poison our people, we will blow you out of existence.” But blowing up people and property hasn’t worked in his war on Iran, and it hasn’t worked in his war on drugs.
The entire campaign, dubbed Operation Southern Spear, is a radical departure from how past presidents tried to combat drug trafficking. The established approach was to intercept, board and search vessels suspected of smuggling illicit substances, before arresting those believed to be guilty of crimes and turning them over to civilian authorities for prosecution.
Under Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, the policy dispenses with the need to find drugs or prove crimes. It’s the height of simplicity: Kill them all. So far, at least 221 lives have been snuffed out.
That number undoubtedly includes innocents. In an Aug. 3 letter to the president, U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., wrote that “a careful review of the available evidence suggests that the United States has killed individuals who are not involved in narcotrafficking.”
Trump insists that every boat sunk saves 25,000 lives that would be lost to drug use. But destroying a fishing vessel saves no one. And the number Trump cites exceeds all the U.S. overdose deaths each year involving cocaine, the predominant drug coming from South America. The biggest share of overdose deaths involves fentanyl, which originates mostly in China and Mexico.
The administration justifies its indiscriminate slaughter by claiming that we are at war with narcoterrorists and thus entitled to use deadly force — never mind that the purported enemies are not carrying out violent attacks on our forces or people. But good luck to the administration in finding an expert on international law who agrees.
The conclusion of the United Nations High Commissioner on Human Rights is that “airstrikes by the United States of America on boats in the Caribbean and in the Pacific violate international human rights law.”
Asked if one September attack constituted a war crime, Vice President JD Vance gave an answer that would not have satisfied his Yale law professors: “I don’t give a s— what you call it.”
In fact, none of these attacks constitute war crimes, because this is not a real war. But hold the applause. Brian Finucane, a national security lawyer for the International Crisis Group, noted: “When you see the premeditated killing of another person outside of an armed conflict, there’s a term for that, and that term is murder.”
Leave aside that this policy is a moral horror and a legal travesty, if you want. It’s also a complete failure on its own terms. In May, The New York Times reported that “nine months into the operation, epidemiologists, addiction scientists and public health experts say cocaine, by far the top drug smuggled out of South America, is as easy to get in much of the United States as it was before the strikes began.”
The Times cited Carl Latkin, a professor of public health at Johns Hopkins University, who said that “this method is as likely to succeed as much as would bombing a handful of McDonald’s in Dallas, Texas, and claiming that you’ve made America healthy again.”
Trump may dismiss such talk as fake news. But it’s entirely consistent with the findings of his own Drug Enforcement Administration. In an assessment disclosed More Top Picks Best Weighted Shoulder Wraps For Anxiety
Derek Maltz, who headed the DEA for the first four months of Trump’s second presidency, essentially acknowledged the failure of these strikes. “You don’t give up just because you’re losing the battle,” he told the Post.
“You don’t give up just because you’re losing” could serve as the official motto of the drug war, which has dragged on since being declared in 1971 by President Richard Nixon. What a surprise to discover that when we mount an offensive to shut off drug shipments, smugglers somehow find ways around it.
Why is that? Because cracking down on foreign suppliers doesn’t diminish the demand from American customers or reduce the profits to be made from selling to them. The drug boat campaign is the equivalent of trying to dam a river with a sheet of plywood.
To be fair, Operation Southern Spear is no more futile than the efforts carried out under previous administrations. It’s just more deadly. And for this president, that’s good enough.
Steve Chapman was a member of the Tribune Editorial Board from 1981 to 2021. His columns, exclusive to the Tribune, now appear the first week of every month. He can be reached at [email protected].
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